Friday, June 6, 2008

Intrigue and Confidence

I wonder how differently all of us will approach our class work next semester?

Isn't it crazy reading about everybody's varied experiences? We're all gonna be saying to each other, "Well yeah, but I learned this at my internship..." We'll drive each other nuts.

But on to the task at hand I have a belated recap of my third week at Loopline Film. The week was wonderfully diverse and productive.  The week began with me finishing the logging and note-taking for the project I've written about before. The notes for the tapes ended up being a 30 page Word document (let's hope it gets some use!)

Later that same day (Tuesday, since we had Monday off due to a "Bank Holiday") I accompanied one of the new employees to do some research for a project in the field. The film will be about Kathleen Lynn, an Irish Doctor in the early 1900's. I won't get into it much, let's say she was important, influential and founded a childrens' hospital in Ireland when the country had the biggest infant mortality rate in Europe. 

Right, but the cool part was we took a trip to the National Museum of Ireland, met up with one of the curators, and got card-swiped into a secret-looking area to view some locked away materials. Yours truly was the photographer and spent the afternoon feeling like a documentary Indiana Jones (that is Indiana Jones pre-"Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", which made me gag.) It felt cooler than I'm sure it sounds.

The rest of the week was just as varied. I met and spoke with my supervisor and other employees to discuss careers in the field of documentary, which was enlightening.

I helped sort the last year's receipts into months and catalogue them under 'petty cash' expenses for the company's taxes, which was meticulous.

Loopline recently moved to this new location so we reorganized the old master tape library, which was laborious.

I slightly had the chance to familiarize myself with a totally different brand of editing software: "Lightworks." It's computer based LINEAR editing from all I can figure, but its set up so the old dogs used to editing with actual film can feel at home. And you don't use a keyboard, you use this video game-esque controller to edit. I forgot my camera, but I'll load some pictures so you can all see it. It seems like the sorta thing that would be much faster than anything we've used one you become familiar with it. Sé Merry Doyle, the big cheese over here, flies through editing on it. 

Granted, the younger guy's here who use FinalCut seem to think it's a dinosaur. I'm undecided.

The second half of the week was spent with two things: First, finishing the rough draft of this 'deadline calendar' I've mentioned before, which I'm almost done with. Secondly, I helped Sé and another editor Marc finish producing a film in two languages (English and Irish), on two editing systems (Sé on Lightworks, Marc on FinalCut), in two rooms at the same time. I've never had so many timecodes floating around in my head. The film is nearly done: "John Henry Foley: Ghosts of the Empire". It's about a 19th Century sculptor...

Today is actually the Monday of my fourth week. I'm taking Tuesday-Thursday off to go to London and see off my girlfriend Laura as she heads back to the U.S. I'll be here for another month. Today though, before I leave, I'm scheduled to discuss my 3o pages of notes on "Patrick Ireland", which should be interesting.

-db

1 comment:

Breanna Roy said...

Sounds like you're having such an amazing experience in IRElAND! Every time someone asks me what internships my classmates have, yours is the first i mention!